ripgrep VS ugrep

I'm the author of Biff. I just wanted to leave a really cool example of something that Biff can do that I _think_ is kinda hard to do otherwise. (And also, I want to make an assertion about it and I hope this will lead to me being wrong and learning something new.)

The use case is: "I want to see a list of all files in a repository, sorted in ascending order of when it was most recently changed according to source control. I also want to highlight the time with color, make it be in local time and format it in my own bespoke way using strftime." Here's the full command (run from the root of https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep):

    $ git ls-files \

For full-text search, ripgrep is faster than any in-app search I've used:

ripgrep – A fancier version of grep commonly used by coding tools.

After finding files, I usually need to search inside them. For that, ripgrep, usually called rg, is my default.

Ah yes... its `-E`.

But fastmod, which is mentioned in at the end of https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#search-and-replace is surprisingly good, both in terms of performance/ux and compatibility.

You just:

  fastmod -m 'something I need to (change|break)' '$1 is inevitable'

BurntSushi/ripgrep

ripgrep needs no introduction. It's grep, but fast. Respects .gitignore, searches recursively by default, and returns results before you finish blinking.

Ripgrep does something like thhis. It has a meta regex engine that switches engine when it finds what looks like pathological cases (or rather, the regex-automata crate does, which is used by the regex crate, which powers ripgrep).

https://docs.rs/regex-automata/latest/regex_automata/meta/st...

Ripgrep in turn exposes some knobs to tweak the heuristics

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#how...

I switched from from ripgrep to ugrep and never looked back. It's just as fast, but also comes with fuzzy matching (which is super useful), a TUI (useful for code reviews), and can also search in PDFs, archives, etc.

The optional Google search syntax also very convenient.

https://ugrep.com

Installation and user guide: ugrep.com (no ads, no cookies, just plain HTML in a GitHub page)

Not heard of ugrep? Read the wiki on GitHub.

These ripgrep announcements are getting a bit old, don't you think? Ripgrep hasn't improved or added new features since 2016. There are other fast alternatives with a lot more features, like ugrep and qgrep for example. Ugrep has fuzzy regex pattern search, archive search (even nested archives!), Boolean search queries like Google, interactive query TUI, hexdumps, and is compatible with GNU grep (ripgrep is not).

It's the first time I hear about the ugrep. Would be nice to compare it with ripgrep, since both provide benchmark tables listing their tool at the top :D. For my everyday use speed doesn't matter much, as well as interactive mode seems useless (YMMV). So I'm staying with ripgrep for now.